While reservations for New Year’s Eve festivities at some island restaurants are sold out with wait-list availability only, it’s still possible to ring in 2015 with a gala evening featuring a multi-course menu, entertainment and bubbly galore.

Take Café L’Europe, where the New Year’s Eve celebration ($295 a person) includes a five-course menu, party favors, a D.J. until 2 a.m. and five large projection screens showing the ball drop in New York City’s Times Square.

Seats are still available for Café L’Europe’s second seating, with arrival time at 9:30 p.m. For reservations, call 655-4020.

Among other Palm Beach restaurants with available New Year’s Eve reservations:

The Breakers’ dining-and-drinking establishment HMF—located in the resort’s expansive and redesigned historic Florentine Room—is typically an evening hotspot, but for a limited time, it’s also a place for holiday-season afternoon tea, nibbles and tipples.

In addition to a wide variety of teas offered on various dates between now and Jan. 3, there’s a menu of champagnes and “daytime tipples” ($15 apiece), such as the `Grand Mimosa’ with fresh-squeezed orange juice, champagne and Grand Marnier, and `The Redhead’ with Charbay Meyer Lemon Vodka, blood-orange liqueur, cranberry juice and lime foam.

Teas are served with tea sandwiches, pastries and buttermilk scones with Devonshire cream, rose-petal jam and preserves.

Whether you’ve a sweet tooth or not, holiday confections by master French pastry chef Patrick Lézé are eye candy—from French macarons in a rainbow of pastels to buches de Noel (yule logs) graced with delicate St. Nick tableaus.

Lézé’s holiday line of finely crafted sweet goodies, available at his eponymous Palm Beach pastry shop and Paneterie in downtown West Palm Beach, includes packaged confections for gift-giving, as well as pies, sponge cakes and specialty items such as gingerbread houses and chocolate truffles.

Prices vary. For instance, macarons are $2 apiece (or a dozen for $22) and macaron gift boxes start at $15 for an assortment of six; buches de [More]

If you’re still understandably boggled by what wines to pair with your Thanksgiving feast—a confluence of so many different flavors, whether you dine out or entertain at home—Virginia Philip, Master Sommelier of The Breakers and owner of an eponymous wine shop and academy in downtown West Palm Beach, has four suggestions.

It’s not exactly customary to eat a lavish meal the night before feasting on Thanksgiving Day, but that’s precisely what some folks will do in Palm Beach on Thanksgiving Eve.

That’s because Nov. 26—the day before Thanksgiving this year—marks the next of Café Boulud’s themed monthly wine dinners, which routinely reach capacity reservations prior to or by the time they take place.

Next week’s wine dinner at Café Boulud (301 Australian Ave.; www.cafeboulud.com/palmbeach) will feature one of France’s esteemed Champagne houses: Billecart-Salmon, which, founded in 1818, is one of just a few longtime Champagne producers that remains family owned.

With a few exceptions, nearly every restaurant in Palm Beach will be open on Thanksgiving, serving turkey and all the fixings and other daily specials—but if you’re partial to dining at home with family and friends on Thanksgiving, you can still leaving the cooking up to someone else.

C’est Si Bon, Amici Market and Publix are among sources for pre-ordering a customizable turkey feast that can then be picked up on Nov. 26, or in at least one case, on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 27.

Where to dine on the 4th of July? For good eats and a fine fireworks view—or perhaps an entirely different all-American good time—read on…

Good bets for dinner, prime fireworks view

In Palm Beach, The Breakers’ Flagler Steakhouse—on the second level of the resort’s golf clubhouse and overlooking a fairway stretching almost as far as the Intracoastal Waterway—features an unobstructed west-facing view directly toward downtown West Palm Beach’s 4th of July fireworks display.

No surprise, then, that seating this Friday on the steakhouse’s prime-view outdoor terrace is sold out. But reservations are still available for the dining room, which offers a fireworks view [More]

As executive chef of three Palm Beach restaurants—not to mention a fourth in downtown West Palm Beach—Kent Thurston will have his hands full this Sunday on Mother’s Day, one of the busiest dining-out days in Palm Beach and beyond.

But the first thing on his to-do list? Get up early and awaken his 7-year-old daughter, Harper, so the two of them can cook a special breakfast-in-bed for their wife/mom, Trish. It has become a tradition to do so.

A while back, the production company of National Geographic Channel’s TV show about the making of noteworthy aquariums—from intricate smaller-scale ones to mammoth theme-park ones—filmed the creation and installation of the custom lionfish aquarium at PB Catch.

Now that episode of NatGeo’s Fish Tank Kings show is about to air—and PB Catch is ready to party, especially because the episode debuts at 9 p.m. on none other than Cinco de Mayo (May 5), one of Mexico’s—and Mexican-Americans’—celebration days.

To commemorate both occasions, PB Catch (251 Sunrise Ave.; www.pbcatch.com) on May 5 will be offering a special Mexican-inspired menu, plus the opportunity [More]